A multi-agent based model for collective purchasing in electronic commerce

Several types of e-commerce (EC) including B2B, B2C, C2C are common on the internet. Collective purchasing in the EC is called customer-to-business EC. This type of EC offers unification of buyer’s common needs and priorities and the interaction between buyers and vendors to provide benefit for both. To achieve this goal, we consider requirements and preferences as two effective factors in the collective purchasing model. Requirements are qualitative or quantitative values which buyers assign to the issues of purchasing. Preferences are priorities assigned by the buyers and their values express the buyer’s measure of importance to the issues. To get buyer’s preferences of the issues, we use analytic hierarchy process. Additionally, a laptop computer buying example is used for illustration how the model calculates preferences of the issues.